Freud has brilliantly led the 'popular' thinker to the core of his scandalous assertion that, beyond even the displaced idea of normal/abnormal, he is prepared to undo the child/adult division and with it the idea of childhood innocence and the Christianocentric idea of a corrupting fall into adult sexual knowledge which surrounds the advent of adult sexuality with its moralizing shame.

It should be clear, however, that this is not the basic distinction between three-dimensional spatially bound objects and nonobjects that the child uses to parse his or her experience.

“You were watching the front.” “Oh yeah, right. So I'm watching the front, and I hear this commotion upstairs. So as I'm looking up, something catches my eye.”

And people who were adaptive copers early in life are likely to cope successfully with the losses that they encounter late in life.